A Place at the Table, reviewed: Jeff Bridges lends a celebrity face to documentary on broken food system

A Place at the Table review: Jeff Bridges lends celebrity face, food for thought

A Place at the Table

Rating:

Director: Kristi Jacobson, Lori Silverbush

Cast: Jeff Bridges

Genre: documentary

Duration: 84 minutes

Synopsis: A documentary that investigates incidents of hunger experienced by millions of Americans, and proposed solutions to the problem.

A Place at the Table, which has also screened at festivals under the title Finding North, has an uphill battle in documenting the epidemic of hunger in the United States. For one thing, when people think of America’s relationship with food, it’s obesity rather than starvation that usually springs to mind.

But filmmakers Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush chip away at the topic until their message becomes unassailable. For one thing, as British author Raj Patel points out, poverty and obesity are neighbours in America.

Farming subsidies mean that processed foods generally deliver a bigger caloric bang for the buck than fresh fruits and vegetables — with all the health issues that implies. And many Americans live in “food deserts,” where fresh food options are an expensive and/or time-consuming distance away.

The documentary is dry but thorough, tracing the history of food welfare programs that almost eradicated the domestic hunger crisis in the 1970s before it started to creep forward again. Even food banks, a well-meaning effort to help, have gone from a stopgap solution to an indispensible cog in a broken machine.

The issue’s celebrity face is Jeff Bridges. He founded the End Hunger Network in 1983, and in ’96 produced a TV movie, Hidden in America, that shed light on the problem of “food insecurity,” or not knowing where your next meal will come from.

“Charity is a great thing,” he says of food banks, “but it’s not a way to end huger. We don’t fund our Department of Defense through charity.” Chafing against government inaction, he fumes: “If another country was doing this to our kids, we would be at war.”

The fix won’t be easy. A Place at the Table makes it clear that the system isn’t so much broken as fractured. Government lobbying, the definition of poverty, food-stamp eligibility, farm subsidies and food distribution are all pieces of the complicated puzzle. The film doesn’t provide a simple answer for the simple reason that there isn’t one.